Everybody uses their iPhone for taking pictures including professional photographers, it’s just not their camera of choice in terms of taking pictures for commercial use. The lens and sensors are too small in smartphones to compete with high level DSLR’s when it comes to picture clarity and depth. You can still get some great shots with them though which would look great on small prints and for web use.
People keep going down the "professional" path, as if iPhones were built for professional photographers, graphic arts professionals, or video editors. Of course not.
"Professional" is simply the wrong term. iPhone is used by huge numbers of people in their day-to-day
business. Contacts, calendars, reminders, driving directions, phone calls, texting, email.... And yes, many take photos as part of their work. Ask real estate brokers about the photos and videos they take for online listings, or eBay vendors posting product shots, construction contractors and interior designers documenting a job site, government officials documenting health violations, restauranteurs adding images to Yelp listings.... they're not worried about "professional quality." A smartphone camera today is likely to be better than the point-and-shoot cameras they used to carry in addition to their flip phones, and because it's part of a communications device, it's dead easy to immediately share those images with co-workers, sub-contractors, clients, etc.
There are huge numbers of people who use smartphones as an integral part of their day-to-day business dealings and for whom the inconvenience and lost time involved in changing platforms (whether iOS to Android or vice versa) would be far worse than paying a $250 price increase to stay within their current platform.
A real estate agent pays far, far more for their car than their phone, yet their phone may make an equal or greater contribution to his/her business success. They may pay more for
one month's worth of auto insurance than they'd pay once every two years on a new iPhone's 25% tariff. When a single missed sale may be worth tens of thousands of dollars, what's $250?
Real professionals (people who use a smart phone as an integral part of their business life) will not be deterred by a price increase. They'll complain, they'll delay the next purchase as much as possible, but the vast majority of them will pay the price.
As to anyone who says, "Apple should absorb the cost..." This is the same consumer mentality that has caused countless smaller businesses to fail; businesses that are afraid to alienate their customers when a price increase would otherwise be necessary. Instead, they take a smaller profit, or even a loss. It can be "death by a thousand small cuts."
What's the difference between whether it's an increase in the cost of labor or raw materials, or a tariff? The business has a choice of making less money on
every sale to every customer by swallowing the cost increase, or risk losing some customers altogether by raising prices. In the end, it's often better to raise prices.
Protective tariffs are
intended to raise the price of imported goods, to discourage the purchase of those goods. It's not a tax on the manufacturer (or foreign country), it's a tax on the consumer, to modify the consumer's behavior. If Apple (or any other affected business) absorbs that cost rather than passes it along, then the consumer won't modify his/her behavior.
The foreign country pays a price only if consumers buy less of those goods. If consumers are either insulated from the tariff (the seller absorbs the cost), or are willing to pay the tariff, then the tariff is not effective at its stated goal. In that case, the one thing it is effective at is increasing government revenues - a tax increase by a different name.
And if companies were to absorb these tariffs, rather than pass them to consumers? Eventually the tariffs would go even higher. Governments that play the protective tariff game don't just give up when they don't obtain the desired results; like a Medieval torture device, they ratchet rates up until the pain inflicted delivers the desired result.
